Homiletics Junkie

    I admit to being a homiletics addict.  No, it's not some kinky form of aerobics or "sexercise", it's a method of passage analysis I use to study the Bible.  It's kind of like outlining backwards.  Instead of starting with a topic and filling in main and sub points until you have a completed text, in homiletics you begin with the text as a whole and divide it into: context, divisions, subject sentence, aim and applications.  When I first learned how to do this at a Bible Study Fellowship seminar, it was a very natural fit for me.  My brain has been wired for homiletics all my life.  It immediately loses the details and "shucks down to the cob" to find the main, important facts.  All these years I thought I was just unobservant.  Remember "Murder She Wrote", Jessica Fletcher would solve the murder by remembering some small, but significant detail.  I will never catch a murderer unless they are covered with blood or waving a poster sized signed confession. 
     But the main reason I am addicted to homiletics is that it forces me to apply what I am learning about in any section of the Bible to my life.  I have studied the Bible since I was a teenager and I know a lot about it, but it didn't change my life on a daily basis until I was in a Bible study whose questions challenged me not only to think about how to apply it, but to be willing to write it down and share it with others.  The addiction has gotten so bad that I do homiletics of my own free will and can't enjoy my BSF questions until I have finished them.  During the summer when BSF isn't meeting, my daily Bible study is doing homiletics on a chapter of whatever book I have chosen to study.  I enjoy it so much, I am almost disappointed when I have to leave it to go back to BSF, to which I am also addicted.  There are much worse addictions than these, of course, but most of the BSF leaders, who are required to do homiletics, don't enjoy them.  The list of people like me, who do them of their own free will and consider them fun, is very small.  I am thinking of forming a support group, but I'm afraid it would attract people who think it's a kinky form of exercise.